Harrow focus on mental health

Good to see the Harrow’s first community mental health workshop on 31 January this year. The workshop was widely publicised.
The event was run in partnership with Thrive LDN, a citywide movement for mental health, supported by the Mayor of London. Community members including health professionals and faith leaders heard about the six aspirations of Thrive and how to achieve them in Harrow.
Sharing his experience of the workshop, Harrow Council interim chief executive Tom Whiting said, “We heard some great ideas for improving Harrow’s mental health, including something as simple as just smiling at each other more.”
Along with the local initiatives like this workshop, Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust which provides a wide range of mental health to borough of Harrow has also improved from being in the failing category in 2015 (for mental health provisions) to being overall good last year (the rating for acute ward for adults of working age and the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, although changed from inadequate to requires improvement, is still not good).
“In February 2015, we rated one of the sixteen core service as inadequate and a further two of the sixteen core service as requires improvement. At this inspection we found the trust had worked to make improvements and the trust had taken action to meet the requirement notices issued following the February 2015 inspection” said the Care Quality Commission.
The CNWL had previously identified several points ‘Must Dos’ for Harrow mental health teams, including:
• promote the privacy (phone calls) and dignity of patients
• reduce the number of times that patients are moved to other wards to sleep for non-clinical reasons, staff must ensure that a thorough handover takes place to promote continuity of care and patients must only be moved at reasonable times so that they are not adversely affected
• make sufficient staff available to work as care co-ordinators